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[WIP] The Highland Home

The Highland home came to us by way of a request: our friend was willing to show off our new maps at GenCon in a few months if we would make him a custom scene for his ~4 hour preconstructed campaign. The request was for a 4 bedroom home with a stables, outhouse, well and shed, all inside a perimeter wall.

Sounds like a great standard map that everyone would enjoy! So we gladly took the project and put it into our standard map pack.

We started with a pen, drawing basic lines all over the artboard, where we wanted trees, where we wanted the wall, how big of a building. It became immediately aparent that we needed the house to fill 1 full page, while the 'other' stuff got crammed into a second page. The layout was pretty forced, because of the space constraints, and we've had several keen observers note that the "outhouse probably shouldn't be so close to the well". Yeah =P Very true, but there's not much else to do about that.

We also left the perimeter wall 1 tile inside the outer edge because enemies need at least SOME space on the map to assault the wall.

Once this stage was done, we began texturing.

For the ground, we masked a 'hand-drawn' grass texture over the top of a vector seed pattern to give it a more colorful popped up feel, since we didn't like any of the grass textures we had available. It might be hard to see, but it's pretty decent.